Donnerstag, 4. Juni 2009

I decided to stop windows development - at least for a while. This means there will be no binary packages from my side for 4.2.4 and 4.3.x but I hope Saro will do them.

The main problem I see is the missing communication between the hobby programmers (like me) and the developers who get paid for their work on KDE. When you take a look at the kde-windows mailing list you will see that there's not much activity. And I don't think there's nothing to discuss... :(

Another problem I've is that I could not fix bugs in kdelibs just because the dependencies are moving fast and since we have to take care for all system libs (png, xml, openssl, pcre, ...). Making sure that they're up-to-date can take a lot of time. And when I finally managed to compile a KDE program I hit compiler errors. This is all fixable but not when you've only a little amount of time for KDE development.

I'm also disappointed by the role of the firms involved in KDE/windows development. Two years ago they asked us what they can do for us. We told them that we need: *a continuous build like the buildbot from Dirk Müller * a proper dbus/windows implementation * a server to place our binary packages * a good packaging system for the end userBut in the end nothing happened so we did all by our own (whereas I played the buildbot). For a long time we did not hear anything from them (except Jaroslaw Staniek was paid by one of them and therefore no longer had time for KDE/windows development). The did an own KDEPim/windows package and used an own packaging instead our KDEWin-Installer. I even could not build kdepim with emerge because of compiler errors...And now some weeks ago they decided to finally start to fix the dbus/windows problem - but instead using the sourceforge windbus project they simply decided to start their own project. I was very angry about this step because they did not even ask if they could use it. Now we've three dbus projects - official dbus, windbus and the new dbus/windows implementation...

We'll see how KDE/windows evolves and maybe I'll participate on the development again but for now I'll step over to Linux and see how to help KDE there.

Mittwoch, 23. April 2008

Long time no post so here a small status update.Two weeks ago I participated the kate developer sprint in Darmstadt. I'm very glad that the kate devs invited me to their sprint and say thanks to Dominik who organized the meeting and Joseph Wenninger and BaSysKom for the dinners.Although I could not help much within their design decisions I got a lot of insight how kate works and what it should be (apart from an easy text editor). I could also fix two annoying bugs (properly restore cursor and selection after Undo/Redo) which bothered me since the first day I used kate. :)

A new binary snapshot (4.0.70) is available during this day. We could not release .67 - .69 because we had some troubles with qt4.4-rc1 and I switched my build system to cmake 2.6.0-rc. It took more work than expected but it's a good test for the cmake devs to be backward compatible.

We're looking forward to split down our packages from e.g. one big kdeedu package to one package for each app. The problem is that I don't have a nice idea how to solve this with cmake so we get all our dependencies automatically. How do the Linux packagers solve this problem?

Mittwoch, 2. April 2008

As Friedrich Kossebau wrote I adjusted okteta to work on windows. But I must correct him in the number of adopted lines. In fact there are only two lines which are platform specific changes. The changes in khe_export.h were only needed because he forgot to change them as he changed the library names. It doesn't hurt on linux but it was wrong. So in the end there're only two changes left to make okteta compile on windows :)

I've also created new binaries (4.0.67). They should appear soon in the installer. kdesdk is missing because it was not compilable, but I already fixed it in svn.

Freitag, 7. März 2008

I'll be there tomorrow (Saturday). Now that Saro is back home I can visit the KDE booth without getting hundreds of bug reports ;)Saro was on Cebit from Tuesday to Thursday and I'm happy that he had some time to visit Bremen - although we had no time for sightseeing it was nice to show him my home.

Montag, 25. Februar 2008

This weekend I built binaries for 4.0.63 snapshot. Kopete should now work with jabber too.For the next snapshot we plan to integrate okular - poppler, freetype and fontconfig are already built but we need some more time to test things :)

Dienstag, 12. Februar 2008

Finally managed to compile and upload 4.0.61. This time I included kdenetwork with kopete (tested only basic icq, jabber support will come with the next snapshot) and kdewebdev. Make sure to select the sourceforge mirror because ftp.kde.org still has 4.0.60.Also created new phonon & amarok packages as the former ones did not work with the current snapshot.

Ralf also released a new version of the Installer. It got a major design rework and now uses libcurl for downloading. Please report bugs to b.k.o or to our mailing list.

As Saro pointed out here we're looking for maintainers who continuously build one kde package. Packaging is done by me (for now) but it would be nice to have someone who makes sure that the package compiles fine with msvc and mingw so I don't have to bother around with compile errors when I want to create a new package.This would also allow me to do some more bugfixing :)